For those of you who are Ubuntuheads and are thinking of upgrading to 12.04, here's my advice - wait.

I'm in the process of upgrading right now, and it's taken the better part of a day so far (with still a couple of hours to go). Everyone and their uncle is hitting that server at the moment.

Mike

EDIT: In fact, I'd advise at this moment not to do it - I have a problem or two now that the upgrade has finished - ones I wasn't expecting at all. I'll spend the next couple of hours screaming at the screen and let you know what's happening.

I've got a very temperamental sidebar. It's OK if I set it to permanent display (which I don't want) but it has a mind of its own otherwise. Most of the time, it's very shy and won't appear when I move the mouse cursor to the extreme left. Sensitivity setting seems to do nothing to help.

I never really liked Ubuntu's default desktop, so I began to overlay it with a "front end" called Cinnamon, which makes finding and launching the program you want easy. The problem was that every time I upgraded my Ubuntu, I had to reinstall Cinnamon and it's a pain in the backside to get right. Then I realised that there's such a thing as Linux Mint - a Linux distribution which is based upon Ubuntu and includes Cinnamon as a default in one of its versions. So now I'm running Linux Mint 17, which uses Ubuntu 14.04 as its base.

Cinnamon seems to be second nature to me, which is probably a function of my age - it's reminiscent of things I became used to in the distant past when PCs were simpler things which did what you wanted them to do with no argument. Anyway, I like it.

I've got an old IBM Thinkpad running a small Ubuntu system, and it's quite happy with that. A lot of modern Linux systems will recognise a dongle immediately but, even if that doesn't happen, there are ways to convince the system that you have one (something to do with it being recognised as a mass-storage device instead of a dongle).

On the other hand, if your system is working satisfactorily as it is, I'd let it get on with it